Archive for the ‘Guild leadership’ Category

Monolith entered the 25 man Ice Crown Citadel last night for the first time. I had spent hours of time preparing for the first four encounters in the zone, and trying to remain reasonable set expectations at killing the first two or three bosses. When we entered the zone, I asked the guild to focus and take the zone with a vengeance.

And we did just that. No boss took us more than a handful of pulls, and in our 3.5 hours of raid time, we cleared the 4 bosses available to us. remember above when I said I was hoping for 2-3? Yea, that was a lie. I was trying to convince myself that it would be just fine if that is all we got down. But I knew that deep down inside that I wanted to have the wing cleared or I’d probably be disapointed…I just wasn’t admitting it to myself😉

We have always looked at Monolith as a family. We celebrate successes together, we struggle through difficulties together, and we grow as a group together. Like all families, we have people who will grate on your nerves, like your annoying Aunt Martha who thinks that the only way to do something is her way, and will tell you about it until you feel like you are going to puke. Sure…you want to tell her to just shut the fuck up, but instead you politely smile and nod as she speaks, as if you really care, all in an effort to keep the family peace.

Why, you might ask, am I talking about my Aunt Martha? Well, we had to let someone from our family go last night.

I’m sure you are thinking “so what, people get kicked from guilds all the time”. That might be true for other guilds…but we really do view our members as part of our family. We have not guild removed anyone outside of their trial period in…well, it’s been so long that I can’t even recall when the last time we did it. It was a difficult decision to make, and one that saddened me quite a bit. However, when all is said and done, I really think it was probably for the best and that ultimately we made the right decision.

We missed the first round of 25 man 310 speed mounts for our guild by not focusing on The Immortal early enough. This was 100% the fault of the leadership, we made a mistake. We told ourselves that we wouldn’t make that mistake again with Ulduar. We nearly had to eat our words when they announced the release of 3.2 and we thought they would be removing the drakes, with us only part way through the hard modes. We nearly had to eat our words as we came to realize how challeging the hard modes were for us as a guild and grew uncertain at our ability to finish what was needed for the meta.

But we weren’t going down without a fight. We’re stubborn that way. When so many other people gave up on the zone, we went back every week and poured our blood, sweat and tears into what we had remaining to complete. And you know what? It was worth every second of time we spent in the zone post 3.2. Perhaps we are “months” behind, and I will admittedly state that the 245/258 gear helped with some of the later hard modes immensely (good god, the people who did things like Yogg 1, Freya and Firefighter 226 gear…how?!?! /salute).

But none of none of those factors make our victory any less sweet :) Celestial Defender Beruthiel here I come!

*Updated to reflect 11/18 datamined informtion for Shadow’s Edge and 11/19 for Shadowmourne. Updated information is courtesy of mmo-champion. Updated information will be notated in Orange.

Orange does strange things to people. It always has, and it likely always will. In order to prevent any sort of drama that tends to follow the orange pixels around, anyone that intends to step foot into Ice Crown Citadel should start thinking now about how to award the newest legendary, Shadowmourne.

Right now we know very little about the weapon itself, and if it’s very much like Val’ynar we won’t know much more about it until the time is upon us to make the decision to award the weapon. Great…once again we need to semi-blindly pick a good candidate without all the best information to base the decision. Bleh. Well, let’s review what we do know about Shadowmoune:

Shadowmoune is a two handed axe. This will limit who may wield this weapon to 4 3 classes: Death Knights, Paladins, Warriors and Hunters. However, based on the proc (explained later) we can effectively rule out this being a hunter weapon (more on this below). *edit: Datamined information confirms that this weapon will only be equipable for Warriors, Death Knights and Paladins.

The weapon proc is stated as such: “Your weapon swings have a chance to drain a Soul Fragment from their undead, demon and elemental victims. When you have acquired 10 soul fragments you will unleash Chaos Bane, dealing 6849-7560 shadow damage split between all undead, demons, and elementals within 8 yards.*edit: “Your weapon swings have a chance to drain a soul fragment granting you 40 strength. When you have acquired 10 soul fragments you will unleash Chaos Bane, dealing 1900-2100 shadow damage split between all enemies within 8 yards”

The language “your weapon swings” I think pretty clearly indicate that this is intended to be a melee weapon, and effectively rule it out as a stat stick for hunters. Feel free to disagree with me on this, but I am willing to bet that hunters will not be on the class limitations of the weapon.

It seems from the pretty cool lore behind the weapon that there will be quests involved to upgrade the weapon to its maximum potential. My guess is that there will be three stages/quests for the weapon. Some of the things stated about Shadowmourne:

To contain the energies that dance across its cold edges, Shadowmourne must be hewn from piles of impure Saronite: the hardened blood of the Old God, Yogg-Saron, treated only by master metal-shapers.

To fuel its power to kill, it is vital that Shadowmourne be drenched in the souls of the most potent servants of the Scourge as they are slain, one by one, with the unfinished blade.

To help break through the Lich King’s armor, Shadowmourne is to be adorned with fragments of the Frozen Throne, originally crafted by Kil’jaeden out of the ice from the Twisting Nether.

So, how do you decide who gets this weapon in your guild? What is the best way to go about making this decision? Let’s take a look at some of the things that Monolith is looking at in making our decision.

Running a guild is more than just recruiting (oh god), leading raids and dealing with bullshit. One of the most important things that comes with running a progression raiding guild is making decisions on prioritizing content. Now, if you are in a cutting edge guild, it’s pretty easy, because you just have to push to the next thing available. However, not all guilds can be cutting edge, and not all decisions can be so black and white. For those of us still trucking along with Ulduar when ToC came along, we had a decision to make: Keep at what remains in Ulduar or can Ulduar and focus solely on ToC.

There are plenty of guilds that opted to never step foot in Ulduar again, and just focus on the ToC content, and that is fine, if that is what worked for them. We decided, however, to take Monolith in a different direction, and it’s this decision that I’m proud of, and think that we “got right”. Read the rest of this entry »

Attempting to teach forum decorum on the WoW forums is an act in futility. I know this. Yet there are certain things that are so damn tacky, that I can’t help myself. I reach out my hand, filled with cookies for the trolls, and open my mouth (or keyboard, as it were!). There was an incident that warranted exactly this response on our realm forums the other day.

Like most realm forums, ours has a “progression” thread that is updated with varying regularity to inform others of the progression of the various raiding guilds on the server. People tend to post their accomplishments in the thread so that the owner of the thread can update their progress. Personally, I think it’s kinda neat to keep track of what people on the realm are doing, so we participate in adding our progress to the thread.

One of the more progressed alliance guilds on the server recently was able to add Hard Mode Twins to their list of achievements. Like all of the other guilds, they went to the forums, posted their accomplishments, and moved on. But here comes the part that pisses me off…some asshole, on a level 1 alt comes along behind them, quotes their post and then adds his own commentary of “i hear door strategy is hard lulz”. Grrrrrrrrrr. Read the rest of this entry »

For the past couple of weeks we have been running Heroic 10s as part of our raid schedule as a test experiment. We do them after our normal 25 run and break our guild into three groups: Thrall, Sylvanas, and Bloodhoof. The goal when we set this up was to have two groups that were stong enough to kill Anub, and one group that could easily do the first 4 bosses, but not anub as we are using alt healers/tanks in this group.

We stack our two Anub groups to maximize DPS and synergies. Thrall is our melee group, Sylvanas is our caster group (who we give a rogue for MS and interrupts on Anub), and Bloodhoof is a mismash of who we have left that aren’t in one of the first two groups. We rotate our melee/casters into the Thrall/Sylvanas groups each week, so the groups are always slightly different to some degree. We allot Thrall and Sylvanas ~90 minutes of time, and Bloodhoof ~60 minutes of time on our given raid night for the zone.

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